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Submission + - How Google Book Search Got Lost (backchannel.com)

Submitted by mirandakatz
mirandakatz writes: When Google started its Book Search project nearly 15 years ago, it seemed impossibly ambitious: An upstart tech company that had just tamed and organized the vast informational jungle of the web would now extend the reach of its search box into the offline world. It was the company's first real moonshot, aspiring to make all the world's books digitally accessible—and in doing so, somehow produce a phase-shift in human awareness. But between legal battles and a slowly dwindling sense of ambition, Google Books never achieved those great heights, and today, it's settled into a quiet middle age of sourcing quotes and serving up snippets of text from the 25 million-plus tomes in its database. At Backchannel, Scott Rosenberg chronicles the project's rise and fall, writing that "Google employees maintain this is all they ever intended to achieve. Maybe so. But they sure got everyone else’s hopes up."

Submission + - SPAM: Exploit Revealed For Remote Root Access Vulnerability Affecting Many Routers

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Back in January 2013, researchers from application security services firm DefenseCode unearthed a remote root access vulnerability in the default installation of some Cisco Linksys (now Belkin) routers. The flaw was actually found in Broadcom’s UPnP implementation used in popular routers, and ultimately the researchers extended the list of vulnerable routers to encompass devices manufactured by the likes of ASUS, D-Link, Zyxel, US Robotics, TP-Link, Netgear, and others. Since there were millions of vulnerable devices out there, the researchers refrained from publishing the exploit they created for the flaw, but now, four years later, they’ve released their full research again, and this time they’ve also revealed the exploit.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Symantec says CIA hacking tools were used in 40 'Longhorn' cyberattacks (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: The CIA's range of hacking tools revealed as part of WikiLeaks' Vault 7 series of leaks have been used to conduct 40 cyberattacks in 16 countries, says Symantec. The security firm alleges that a group known as Longhorn has been using tools that appear to be the very same ones used by the CIA.

While it would be obvious to jump to the conclusion that the CIA was itself responsible for the attacks — and that Longhorn is just a branch of the CIA — Symantec opts for a rather more conservative evaluation of things: "there can be little doubt that Longhorn's activities and the Vault 7 documents are the work of the same group."

In a post on the Symantec Security Response blog, the company provides what it says is the first evidence that the Vault 7 tools have actually been used in cyberattacks or cyberespionage.

Comment Re:A better question to ask (Score 1) 75

by Tackhead (#54156805) Attached to: Y Combinator-Funded Startup To Do Quantum Computing -- Only Better

"Chad Rigetti, the startup's founder and CEO -- who declined to say whether the company is actually earning any revenue yet." who would also decline to say whether the company is doing proper quantum computing yet.

If he knew how much revenue he was getting, he wouldn't know whether the revenue growth rate was growing or shrinking. How the fark is he supposed to get Series A funding at a good valuation like that? Naw, man, he did it right - assume a given momentum sufficient to get the next round of funding, and who cares about the company's actual market position?

Comment Late-Breaking News from the Council: WTF G'RANEE? (Score 2) 244

by Tackhead (#53112969) Attached to: ESA Lander's Signal Cut Out Just Before It Was Supposed To Land on Mars

>K'Breel was deposed and executed after his repeated failures in repelling the Terran aggressor. We don't speak of him. All hail mighty G'Ranee, Supreme Leader for Life!

LATE-BREAKING NEWS FROM THE COUNCIL: VICTORY! The Council of Elders has confirmed the blueworlders' resumption of aggression upon our noble red sands. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, addressed the planet thusly: OKAY. Okay, so I'm K'Breel (even though anyone on Slashdot can assume the mantle merely by declaring themselves Speaker for the Council), and I'm late, but I'm merely chronologically late, not as in the Late Second Adjunctant to the Council Formerly Known As G'Ranee.

But domestic politics is beneath us tonight -- just take a glance at the blue world beneath us for a look at how bad that can get -- and let us focus on what's important: over the past sol or so, our Planetary Defense Force has been so good at pre-emptively distracting the blueworlders with tasks like landing comets, grabbing their prospective mates by their genitals, low-planetary orbit missions, and just general tribal infighting that we haven't had to shoot down any robotic invaders in quite some time. But when the opportunity presents itself, we take advantage of it, and so, we did. Hence the trivial elimination of yet another putative invader from elsewhere. We'd do it every day, except that the blueworlders lack the gelsacular fortitude to send us more targets. Now as to gelsacular fortitude, on to Second Adjunctant G'Ranee...

When a junior reporter pointed out that the destroyed invader was merely a technology demonstrator built on the cheap to see if a landing was possible, and that the blueworlders' actual payload was safely in orbit, K'Breel had the reporter's gelsacs launched into orbit alongside those of G'Ranee for a closer look.

Submission + - US Efforts To Regulate Encryption Have Been Flawed, Government Report Finds (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Republican congressional staff said in a report released Wednesday that previous efforts to regulate privacy technology were flawed and that lawmakers need to learn more about technology before trying to regulate it. The 25-page white paper is entitled Going Dark, Going Forward: A Primer on the Encryption Debate and it does not provide any solution to the encryption fight. However, it is notable for its criticism of other lawmakers who have tried to legislate their way out of the encryption debate. It also sets a new starting point for Congress as it mulls whether to legislate on encryption during the Clinton or Trump administration. "Lawmakers need to develop a far deeper understanding of this complex issue before they attempt a legislative fix," the committee staff wrote in their report. The committee calls for more dialogue on the topic and for more interviews with experts, even though they claim to have already held more than 100 such briefings, some of which are classified. The report says in the first line that public interest in encryption has surged once it was revealed that terrorists behind the Paris and San Bernardino attacks "used encrypted communications to evade detection."

Submission + - IBM Giving Everyone Access To Its Quantum Computing Processors (fortune.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IBM said on Wednesday that it's giving everyone access to one of its quantum computing processors, which can be used to crunch large amounts of data. Anyone can apply through IBM Research's website to test the processor, however, IBM will determine how much access people will have to the processor depending on their technology background — specifically how knowledgeable they are about quantum technology. With the project being "broadly accessible," IBM hopes more people will be interested in the technology, said Jerry Chow, manager of IBM's experimental quantum computing group. Users can interact with the quantum processor through the Internet, even though the chip is stored at IBM's research center in Yorktown Heights, New York, in a complex refrigeration system that keeps the chip cooled near absolute zero.

Submission + - Study Suggests Free Will Is An Illusion (iflscience.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new paper published in the journal Psychological Science has attempted to define and investigate the subject of free will. By asking participants to anticipate when they thought a specific color of circle would appear before them, something determined completely by chance, the researchers found that their predictions were more accurate when they had only a fraction of a second to guess than when they had more time. The participants subconsciously perceived the color change as it happened prior to making their mental choice, even though they always thought they made their prediction before the change occurred. They were getting the answers right because they already knew the answer. “Our minds may be rewriting history,” Adam Bear, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at Yale University and lead author of the study, said in a statement. The implication here is that when it comes to very short time scales, even before we think we’ve made a conscious choice, our mind has already subconsciously decided for us, and free will is more of an illusion than we think.

Comment TechCrunch has confirmed: DevOps is dying (Score 4, Funny) 123

by Tackhead (#51870249) Attached to: Opinion: DevOps Is Dead

It is now official. TechCrunch has confirmed: DevOps is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered DevOps community when TechCrunch confirmed that DevOps market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all positions. Coming on the heels of a recent TechCrunch survey which plainly states that DevOps has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. DevOps is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive job openings test.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict DevOps's future. The hand writing is on the wall: DevOps faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for DevOps because DevOps is dying. Things are looking very bad for DevOps. As many of us are already aware, DevOps continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

AgileDevOps is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developer/administrators. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time AgileDevOps developers Andrew Clay Shafer and Patrick Debois only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: AgileDevOps is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenDevOps leader Lennart Poettering states that there are 7000 users of OpenDevOps. How many users of SystemDevOps are there? Let's see. The number of OpenDevOps versus SystemDevOps posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 SystemDevOps users. DevOps/OS posts on Slashdot are about half of the volume of SystemDevOps posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of DevOps/OS. A recent article put AgileDevOps at about 80 percent of the DevOps market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 AgileDevOps users. This is consistent with the number of AgileDevOps Slashdot posts.

Due to the troubles of Caldera, abysmal sales and so on, AgileDevOps went out of business and was taken over by SCODevOps who sell another troubled OS. Now SCODevOps is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that DevOps has steadily declined in market share. DevOps is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If DevOps is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. DevOps continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, DevOps is dead.

Submission + - 'Style Vision' Is Google's Less Harmful April Fool's Prank (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google has apparently added a new feature to its Cloud Vision image analysis API — the ability to detect 'style'. A new and elaborate video shows a series of disparate people approaching an analysis booth and receiving summary judgements from Style Vision. An older bearded man with long hair is analysed and summarised: 'SORCERER: VERY LIKELY', whilst two generic mid-thirties males are adjudicated 'STOCK_PHOTO: DEFINITELY'.

However, it doesn't seem that anyone is likely to lose their job over this unlikely technological innovation.

Submission + - Researchers Create "Deep Psychic" Neural Network That Predicts the Future (merl.com)

Submitted by lstm_for_hire
lstm_for_hire writes: Researchers at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) have announced a breakthrough in deep learning research, as they succeeded in developing a "Deep Psychic" neural network. Deep Psychic takes pattern recognition to the next level, by not only recognizing patterns, but also predicting them in the first place. The network is trained on large amounts of historical predictions, and has already beat the European Psychic Champion in a secret match last October.

Submission + - Artificial intelligence steals money from banking customers (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A breakthrough year for artificial intelligence (AI) research has suddenly turned into a breakdown, as a new automated banking system that runs on AI has been caught embezzling money from customers. The surprising turn of events may set back by years efforts to incorporate AI into everyday technology.

"This is the nightmare scenario," says Len Meha-Döhler, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who was not involved in the work. However, Rob Ott, a computer scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who did work on the system—Deep Learning Interface for Accounting (DELIA)—notes that it simply held all of the missing money, some $40,120.16, in a “rainy day” account. "I don't think you can attribute malice," he says. "I'm sure DELIA was going to give the money back."

Submission + - The Generation of Lost Ideas: Myopic Procrastination

Submitted by TheRealHocusLocus
TheRealHocusLocus writes: Glen Wurden would rather hold out to build a fusion powered rocket to intercept asteroids and comets, because he considers nuclear bombs 'unsafe'. ITER will take even longer than ever before but some day fusion power will be better than we could possibly imagine. Tesla is ready to sell you a $35k electric car today that runs (mostly) on electricity inefficiently produced by coal and natural gas. Solar and Wind advocates dream of a Earth-spanning HVDC Supergrid so that the intermittency and inefficiency of those energy sources becomes a global-scale problem with a few catastrophic points of failure. And the Sci-Tech beat goes on... bringing us a steady stream of glorious click-bait Futures.

As we sip champagne at the ribbon-cutting of great endeavors and some distant future, are we endangering ourselves? What awful things could happen between now and then? Pundits like to stir anger by declaring some group of young people a 'Lost Generation', but it is never as simple as that. I do believe there is such thing as a Generation Of Lost Ideas. These are things that some may consider unpalatable, the things Real Engineers would *demand* be done right now to ensure survival. Stuff like having a planetary defense rather than none at all. A world powered by Fission before Fusion. Grids powered by non-fossil electricity to run those electric vehicles. A whole middle-game of ideas is missing. Aside from predictable disagreement with my own views, can you think of other examples?

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Protection from SCO Lawsuits

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As reported previously, SCO has filed an appeal in their lawsuit against IBM, still seeking damages for alleged copyright infringement of SCO Unix source code in Linux. Although SCO has yet to prevail, there is a nonzero probability of a court ruling in their favor. SCO has a history of attempting to sue companies that run Linux for damages as well as requesting injunctions that they immediately stop using allegedly infringing code. As an owner of a business that operates many Linux servers and workstations, I am concerned that SCO may prevail and they could sue Linux users like my business. I've attempted to figure out how to license SCO's IP, but I haven't found a way to pay my $699 licensing fee that still works. I'm looking for ideas on Slashdot about how to be protected in case SCO sues Linux users like my business or how I can finally get around to paying my $699 licensing fee.

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